Problem and Solution
by lethedrop
Summary: Set in Rosenkruez. The warped seeds of Brad x Schuldig: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.


—The section in my Psych textbook about sexual orientation started me contemplating the statistical unlikelihood of our beloved fanon. This is an answer that occurred to me. (As if we need rationale for our fantasies, right?)

Disclaimer: I don't own _Weiss Kreuz_/_Knight Hunters_ and make no financial profit from this fanwork.

Timeline: Schuldig and Brad are youngsters in training at Rosenkreuz.

—Tokyo (東京) is written "East" and "Metropolis".

**Problem and Solution**

Schuldig reclined against an old beech tree, wishing he could duck behind it instead. Hiding made you look guilty, and the point of _being_ guilty was to not get caught.

His target, Brad Crawford, darling of the Precognitive Department, had approached the little nobody telepath a couple days prior with the usual Seer BS about paths and choices and what exactly the older boy intended the future to look like.

"We're going to have to trust each other," he had proclaimed in his fading (but still ugly) American accent. "Not until we're out from under the higher ups' noses, of course, but before we reach the Eastern City. It will be critical."

Schuldig had considered telling Crawford where to stick his "critical", but the older boy wasn't shielding his thoughts very well and meeting his eyes directly had gotten the telepath a mindful. Anyone _that_ convinced of his accuracy wasn't worth arguing with.

That night, Schuldig's dreams were full of blood and city lights, many of the latter forming neon signs in some Asian script and too much of the former belonging to himself and Brad.

By reveille, Schuldig had concluded that he and Crawford needed to trust each other. Unfortunately, Schuldig didn't trust anyone, and neither, he was sure, did Crawford. It was one of those mindsets associated with too many memories and too many life choices. Even the head of the Telepathy Department, who was scarily powerful, said it took something drastic to change such a deeply rooted foundational mental pattern. Something like wiping the target's entire memory or torturing them until their mind broke.

Schuldig would probably be able to do either by the time he left the Institute, but neither would solve the problem. He needed something subtler.

A couple days of contemplation had lead to his casually lurking in the courtyard with homework that wasn't even due for two days, watching Crawford.

The precog, as seemed to be his habit, was sitting on a bench a few yards from Schuldig's tree, his mind full of trigonometry. Something about cosine, anyway. When integrating x times cosine x….

Schuldig sank deeper, from surface thoughts and their attached emotions (mostly the non-emotion of concentration, and a little boredom) through the underlying anxiety over a political science test (he was going to miss number fourteen but couldn't quite see what the question would be), through deeper concerns, memories and impulses.

Brad had a fairly orderly mind for a non-telepath. It was surprisingly comfortable, which somehow made Schuldig's intentions a little easier.

Finally reaching the instincts, he began to partially weave his Schuldig-self with his Brad-self's underused sex drives and tweak them.

Schuldig was no microkinetic (and wouldn't want to be; healing was boring), but one of the first things a telepath was taught was that the mind affected the body. He knew that the mind didn't just, say, tell a hand to grasp a weapon; it controlled internal chemistry, hormones and stuff, which in turn affected how tissues were built, such as in the brain. Nice young brain tissue like Brad's was sure to take Schuldig's changes and set them into the hardwiring.

Slowly, he withdrew.

It was an elegant solution, really. Sex could make people crazy, even to the point where they betrayed Eszett together, so it should have no problem engendering trust between a leader and his subordinate. If Schuldig's own sex drive kicked in straight, he could change it easily enough.

His two brief forays into Crawford's mind hadn't shown him any visions or thoughts that hinted at his actions, but negatives couldn't be proven so there was no telling whether the other boy knew or would know what Schuldig had done. It didn't matter, though. They'd had a problem and Schuldig had fixed it. He had a feeling this was the beginning of a pattern.


End file.
